The Slitherants: China-The South West, Guanzhou and Xiamen

China...One month in China, no blog access, no facebook, therefore no updates! To try to cover all the things that happened, highlights and lowlights, from our month in China would require more words than I am able to write and no doubt many more than even the most dedicated follower of our blog would be prepared to read. Therefore I have decided to pick out certain things as they come back to me and use some headings to catergorise certain aspects of the trip that we enjoyed or endured. So here goes...

Travel. As we had arrived in China via the border with Laos, we entered in the far south western city of Jinghong. From here to our final destination of Beijing is around 3000km's by train. As we wanted to have a week each in both Shanghai and Beijing respectively we had to get our skates on. On our initial journey on the overnight bus from Jinghong to Kunming (about 10 hours) a group of three guys set about robbing the other passengers while they slept. Kate awoke to find a guy trying to get her small backpack out from underneath her but luckily she had wisely wrapped the bag straps around her leg. She woke with a fright and the guy started saying 'Aww...solly..solly' however he merely moved onto his next target. As I was fast asleep Kate put her hand out to wake me up but the guy's accomplice in the seat behind her pushed her hand away. Kate was then forced to lay there as this guy went around the bus and lifted people's wallets and belongings from them. How the bus driver didn't notice I'll never know but he might of been in on it perhaps? The guys were let out at a stop not long after that and Kate was finaly able to wake me. Luckily none of our stuff was missing due to Kate's vigilance and the fact that they hadn't targeted any of my belongings. Not the best introduction to public transport in China.

We had thought that the train would be a better way to travel and in some ways it was. The tickets were an absolute nightmare to purchase as the station would be completely packed with everyone trying to push in front of one another and almost none of the ticket office people understanding any English. The tickets themselves were relatively expensive and, of course, all the best sleeper bunk tickets would sell out first leaving only the dreaded 'cattle class' tickets available.

Our first train journey was supposed to be a 'mere' 24 hour trip from Kunming to Guangzhou. Thankfully we were able to secure 'hard sleeper' bunk-bed type tickets on this train but thats about where our good luck ran out. Due to the unusually severe monsoon rains at the time the train was delayed by a mind-bending ten hours, stretching our journey out to a buttock-shattering 34 hours! To say I was jaded by the end of this trip would be a gross understatement. We may have had bunks, but we didn't have seats, and the bunks were the very top ones which are so close to the roof you can't even sit up and you can't see anything either. I stole the 'smokers chair' from the area between the carriages, put my pillow on it and parked up next to the window and there I stayed bolted in case one of the pesky smokers got tired of standing and tried to steal it back! The nearby filthy squat toilets backed up (of course) so there was a constant reek of pooh and god knows what else lingering in our section of the carriage. 34 hours! Goddamn, I still can't believe we made it even now.

In spite of us trying to buy our tickets a week in advance (this is when they become available) the trip mentioned above was the only one where we were able to get sleeper bunks. We did score bullet train tickets for the eight hour journey from Xiamen to Shanghai and this was like winning the train lottery compared to the other journeys we had to endure in cattle class. Ahh cattle class, this is like some kind of sadistic torture where one hundred people with tickets and about another twenty or so 'standing class' passengers are crammed cheek by jowl in one carriage out of about seventeen for up 16 hours. At least we had a seat I guess but damn! People spit and throw their rubbish on the floor, babies are crying, old men are snoring and the atmosphere is hot and fetid due to so many people being crammed into what amounts to a pretty small space.

On one trip there was a lady with a bad cough and she coughed almost non-stop the entire way from Shanghai to Beijing, about 14 hours! On another journey we had a guy and his son across from us (along with a few others) and the Dad had bought a two litre of Coke with him as his and his son's drinks for the overnight journey. Coke for a little kid on an overnight train!! I mean, come on...I'm no rocket scientist but even I know Coke has tons of sugar and caffeine in it. Predictably, after a couple hours, the kid was quite literally swinging from the over head luggage rack and walking along the seat-tops while, amazingly, his old man nodded off blissfully unaware of what his sugar fuelled little cherub was up to!

In another cattle class incident an old lady with about three of what must have been her grandkids was holding a baby against her chest while she (and the baby) nodded off. Next minute the train takes a rather sharp corner and grandma topples out of her seat and pile-drives the babies head into the carriage floor! All hell breaks loose, the grandma's beside herself, the baby is screaming blue-murder and I'm wondering why I didn't just shell out the extra couple hundred bucks for a flight!

The lights in the carriage stay on all night, the seats are basically rigid park benches with a bit of material thrown over them and every half hour or so, no matter what time of the day it is, a lady pushing a food and drink trolley comes through shouting 'does anyone want any noodles!!' No I want sleep you sick, sadistic woman but that is the only thing you can guarantee you won't be able to get in cattle class.

Alright I think you get the idea, but I really needed to vent a little as I had expected the trains in China to be an upgrade on the ones in the other countries we had visited. Unless you can spring for the bullet train or are able to get bunk beds I do not recommend it. In our case we didn't have much choice due to time and budget restraints but lets just say when I jumped off that final train in Beijing I was pretty damn happy. Even if I smelt bad, hadn't slept a wink and had other peoples ramen noodles stuck to me.

The South West and Guangzhou. Alright so after arriving in Jing Hong we proceeded to try and have a little fun. We visited a spa and sauna resort in a nearby city which was supposed to be $1.50 each. Due to some bad information it ended up being $25 each! Ouch, there goes the daily budget. Nevertheless it was pretty nice and it had a huge swimming pool filled with thousands of those small fish that like to eat your dead skin cells. That was alot of fun but very ticklish! It also had a giant room filled with salt (wtf?) that I assume is supposed to be good for your skin or something, so we buried one another in it but I was wondering to myself 'what is the actual point of this??'.

Kunming turned out to be a rather cold, wet and not particularly interesting place. We learned a valuable lesson here about the availability of budget accomodation in China when, on our first day, we had to walk around the city for a patience sapping five hours in order to find a room! I simply could not believe that a city of more than a million people could have a complete lack of suitable accomodation, but there you go, lesson learned. The last two hours of this sorry march were spent in the midst of a torrential monsoon downpour that really had my spirits soaring. After this we realised that our old method of doing 'the walk of shame' around wherever we had just arrived was not going to be adequate anymore.

After our nightmare 34 hour train ride to Guangzhou we arrived at 11pm to, once again, no accommodation! As we had been expecting to arrive at midday we thought we would have plenty of time to find a room. Wrong! We eventually found a room off a room tout near the train station, which is exactly what you're not supposed to do, but after our hellish trip and the fact it was nearly midnight we wearily agreed. The room in the brochure we had been shown was clearly not where we were taken, surprise, surprise. This place looked like the sort of room you would take someone to be murdered to and it was pretty foul even by our normally pretty modest standards. We were both so tired we didn't care as long as the door had a reliable lock on it, we could sleep there uninterrupted and then get the hell out first thing in the morning. This is precisely what we did.

The next day we found a room in an okay hotel but the trouble was it was quite a long walk to get to a subway station or any restaurants. At this time I proceeded to get sick and had to spend about three agonising days in bed. As food was hard to acquire locally and the neighbourhood wasn't that great, I would be forced to accompany Kate on missions to find food. Guangzhou is one of the most humid places on earth apparently and I would be absolutely exhausted just trying to keep up with Kate. To make things even better Kate got sick too, the train station was proving incredibly difficult to acquire tickets from and I was starting to think we had made a big mistake in coming to this place. Anyway after recooperating for a few days we had both pretty much come right though I had a niggly cough that would stay with me for the remainder of our time in China and I seriously think it had something to do with the air in the cities there. It is so gross, especially in Beijing, that you don't know how people can breathe it year after year.

Thankfully our next stop of Xiamen was to turn around some of the less enjoyable aspects of our first ten days or so. Unfortunately we only had a few days here due to time constraints but it was well worth a visit and I would definitely come back to this place. Xiamen is actually a city on an island and has another much smaller island just off it called 'Gulang-yu'. Finally we got to walk around a lovely city and actually start putting some enjoyable days back to back and have a bit more fun. Gulang-yu is very pretty with alot of old colonial buildings and lots of cool shops and cafes scattered about the place and it even had a beach that was swimmable! The lookout from the top of the island was awesome and gave you an amazing view of the Xiamen waterfront. We dined out at sidewalk restaurants on fresh fish and enjoyed the relatively dry, humidity-free climate. As we were sitting at our roadside table after ordering two fish from the restaurants tank we heard a loud 'whack!'. It was the chef who had grabbed a net, fished out our dinner and then whacked it on the footpath to kill it! We both looked over and the old lady from the shop next door must of said something to him as when he grabbed the next fish he merely laid it on the footpath and started chopping it's head off with a huge cleaver-much better! Regardless the fish was excellent and we were both really starting to feel that our trip to China was back on track.

We had tickets for the bullet train to Shanghai the following day where the skateboarding dream maker that is 'SMP park' lay in wait. We also had some friends we had met in Malaysia to catch up with there, not to mention all the great shopping and even my birthday to look forward to! I have to sign off here as this post is already long enough but I shall finish off our adventures in China next time. 'Til then. TC.

Jing Hong

Salt room

Tim is obviously really loving this salt!

Look at these togs! Tim forgot to bring his togs to the spa so he had to buy some tighty togs! haha

Me and the massaging fish.

The streets of Jing Hong were all palm and tree lined. It was a nice change.

Me and the guy from a dumpling soup restaurant. I ate sooo many dumplings while I was in China that it makes me feel sick if I think about them.

Kumming

In the city's square there were these two giant gates.

The city square again with the gates in the background.

There were billboards, flashing neon lights and big buildings everywhere in China.

On our 5 hour mission to find accomodation we came across some really old pretty buildings. We didn't see anything like these for the rest of our trip in China. I think a lot of the old buildings are or have been destroyed and replaced with skycrapers, apartment buildings and fake old buildings. I really thought we would see a lot of old buildings but we didn't at all!

Another old building.....

but unfortunately I think it is being destroyed....

and being replaced by skyscrapers!!!

We did a lot of walking while we were in China - more than any other country because we couldn't hire motorbikes and we couldn't read Chinese so we couldn't work out how to use the buses. If there were metro systems then we could use it as it often had the stations in English. This is a picture of Tim after a whole day walking around the city - he is not happy at all! I think we were on the mission to find English books.

While we were in the same park as above, we came across this guy who was obviously practising his English. But the funny thing was that he was reading aloud (and I mean LOUD!) a conversation about applying for a job. To make it even stranger (or funnier) it sounded like he was practising a piece for a play (with a lot of hand gestures!)

Through this city, there were these robotic policemen that were fixed to the foot path. They didn't do anything as far as we could tell but flashed lights!

Guangzhou

A poor looking side street in China.

Another shitty looking side street and construction! Everywhere in China they are destroying buildings and building new buildings and roads/train tracks! Even in the countryside (literally in the middle of nowhere) you saw new apartment buildings being built.

A herb and animal market. I have heard you can buy cats, dogs, turtles, monkeys and other unfortunate animals to eat here but fortunately we didn't see any, just alot of herbs.

A shop filled with herbs.

Construction workers sleeping on the job!

One of the many, many shopping districts in Guangzhou. Guangzhou is the international hub for fashion wholesaling so there are wholesale shops and malls everywhere. There is a tiny piece of the ancient city street under the glass cabinet.

At the Guangzhou Museum of Art we saw this fabulous exhibition of a Chinese cartoonist, Liao Bingxiong. Even though we don't understand Chinese we could still understand some of what Liao was trying to express as per above called Subdued at Last (1935). I think this cartoon, like much of his work from this time was anti-Japanese.

Thanks to the internet here is a bit about Liao "Liao Bingxiong graduated from Guangzhou Normal School at age 17, in the midst of World War II. His anti-Japanese comic strips started appearing in newspapers that same time. During the war years, Liao also began drawing 'Spring and Autumn in Cat Kingdom'. It would make his reputation as one of China's greatest cartoonists.Wanted by the government for the criticism Liao expressed in his cartoons however, he changed his name and fled. After the Communist victory, Liao returned and became vice president of the Chinese Artists Association.But he continued to criticize government wrongdoing in his cartoons and was removed from his position in 1957. For 20 years he was forbidden to draw cartoons. When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Liao resumed cartooning." Above is one of the first cartoons he drew, a self portrait.

Xiamen

Our feast on the street. For some reason Tim asked the waiter to move the table to the middle of the foot path and she was more than happy to do this. I think we were good advertisement for her restaurant!

One of the two fish we ate. I think this is the fish that was killed on the foot path!

More street views..

and another.

This is the only place in the world where I have seen an elevated road for buses only. Maybe Auckland could use this to solve their public transport problems???

The city at night.

They do flashing neon so well in this country.

Gulang-Yu

On our ferry journey to Gulang-yu. Notice the two guys in matching Hawaian T-shirts.

Gulangyu is car-free island with narrow, winding lanes and predominately has Victorian-era styled buildings which I gather is because China lost the first Opium War. Also, the island is teeming with Chinese tourists.

The little beach on Gulang-Yu. Tim had a swim. I could only put my toes in because the water was too dirty for my liking.

Narrow land on Gulangyu.

Being tourists!

The view of Xiamen city from Gulangyu.

More of the city. In the foreground are some of the old buildings on Gulangyu.

An old derelict building hidden behind a giant gate.

The look-out on Gulang-yu.

Two beautiful parrots at the entrance of the bird park that are unfortunately chained to that metal rod! No animal rights (and human rights) in this country!

I love this shot!

We went to this bird show where these poor birds were forced to do these funny performances....Here the bird is being enticed to say such things as "hello" in Mandarin, Cantonese and English!

riding a bike...

and skating!

Train travel

Below are pictures from our train journeys. Where possible I have put some pictures of the countryside (this is for you Mum really as you keep asking me what it looks like. I hope this satisfies your curiosity!)

Kumming to Guangzhou (the train was delayed by 10 hours)